New from Peter Sís: a children's book about living behind the Iron Curtain

By CECELIA GOODNOW, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Photo: ANDY ROGERS/P-I PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

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Peter Sís remembers that when the Berlin Wall was there, "it was so scary, and it divided everything. And soldiers were everywhere." (Photo Illustration: Andy Rogers/P-I)

Peter Sís remembers that when the Berlin Wall was there, "it was so scary, and it divided everything. And soldiers were everywhere." (Photo Illustration: Andy Rogers/P-I)

Photo: ANDY ROGERS/P-I PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

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Illustration from "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain."

Illustration from "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain."

Photo: PETER SIS

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Illustration from "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain."

Illustration from "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain."

Photo: PETER SIS

New from Peter Sís: a children's book about living behind the Iron Curtain

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When Peter Sís took his wife and children to Prague a few years ago, he found all traces of Soviet-era repression expunged from the gray city of his youth. It was as if the guard towers and compulsory parades and thought police had never existed.

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All that remained of that grim era was the residue of fear that still haunts him today, some 25 years after his defection to the U.S.

"I had a very comfortable life," said Sís, who was the son of a Czech filmmaker, "but there were people who spent their life in prison, whose families were destroyed."

Fear is the last thing you'd expect from Sís (pronounced cease), a MacArthur Fellow and highly lauded picture-book creator who has spent his life celebrating individualists and free thinkers, from the Beatles to Charles Darwin.

It's a paradox, admits the broodingly handsome author, who has been touring college campuses to talk about his visual memoir, "The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18).

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Written as a children's picture book, it chronicles an era Sís said is largely unknown and unthinkable to people who grew up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 18 years ago Friday.

"Not only children in America, but children in Berlin and Prague -- it's like 100 years ago to them," Sís said incredulously. "In a way, it's like it never happened.

"I remember (that) when the wall was there, it was so scary, and it divided everything. And soldiers were everywhere."

Though "The Wall" isn't Sís's first autobiographical work, its undercurrent of despair and rebellion make it his most personal book.

Sís was a young man in 1968 during the brief flowering of freedom known as the Prague Spring, which collapsed when Soviet tanks and troops rolled in to assert the old order.

He's 58 now -- a charming, solicitous man who still seems somewhat dazed at the happy circumstances of his later life in New York's Hudson River Valley, where he lives with his wife and two teenage children.

Gauging an audience

Seattle was raw and blustery the day Sís stopped by on his way to Western Washington University in Bellingham. He said the publisher had sent him to tour colleges rather than bookstores to signal the weight of this complex picture book.

"People think children's books are about teddy bears and little flowers," Sís said, referring to the difficulty of pigeonholing his work. "I realize people sometimes don't know what to do with my books because they say, 'Is it a children's book, and what age group?' "

The hotel's fireside chairs beckoned on that gusty day, but Sís went willingly into the breach to pose for newspaper photos. Patient and accommodating, he tramped up and down a slippery, muddy slope -- dodging blackberry thorns and a dead mouse -- to fulfill the photographer's artistic vision.

"Can I help you? Are you sure? Let me carry something," Sís mother-henned a limping member of the entourage, attentive to a fault.

Sís has created many picture books, including two Caldecott Honor books, "Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei," and "Tibet Through the Red Box," about his father's secret filmmaking mission in Tibet in the 1950s.

He also has illustrated books by other authors, including Jack Prelutsky of Seattle, the nation's first children's poet laureate, and George Shannon of Bainbridge Island.

Still, the enormity of trying to portray the communist era in a picture book overwhelmed him. After several false starts, he nearly abandoned the project. Nine years ago Václav Havel, whom he'd known since boyhood, warned him he was trying to explain the inexplicable. "You can't do book about growing up behind Iron Curtain," Sís quotes Havel, who was then president of the Czech Republic. "You have to live it."

High praise

Despite the hurdles, "The Wall" has drawn raves. Told through re-created journal entries and cramped, gray miniatures with terse captions, it traces Sís' evolution from "brainwashed" child to rebellious teen.

A Kirkus review deemed it "a masterpiece for readers young and old."

Publishers Weekly said: "Younger readers have not yet had a graphic memoir with the power of 'Maus' or 'Persepolis' to call their own, but they do now."

Sís said he wants young people to understand how oppressive life was behind the Iron Curtain, because he believes they take freedom for granted.

His urgency was palpable as he leaned forward in his seat, spilling anecdotes about a time of life he is still trying to process.

At 9 he was a Young Pioneer, marching proudly (if involuntarily) in state parades wearing red neckerchief, a belt buckle inscribed "Forever Ready" and the ribbons he'd earned collecting scrap metal and picking potatoes and hops. To enhance his heroic image, he pinned on some of the war medals his mother collected.

"It was like a dream of people," he said, "to get as many ribbons as possible."

In a society where schoolchildren were taught the virtue of informing on parents and friends, Sís had an opportunity to show his loyalty by reporting on his grandmother and aunt, who had taken to sneaking him into church, in defiance of state policies on religion.

"But I couldn't do it," he said, "because it was family."

By adolescence Sís had begun to question a life he once accepted without challenge. Like many other young Czechs, he battled authority with symbols of the West -- rock 'n' roll, blue jeans, shaggy hair, psychedelic art and state-banned pulp noir he read on the sly.

Harangued to the brink of suicide by a Socialist Realist art teacher who declared he had no talent, Sís drew in private and found solace in rock music.

He joined a band, became a disc jockey, interviewed the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Who, and accompanied the Beach Boys on their Czech tour.

In hindsight, Sís said, he believes the music of the free world helped crack the Berlin Wall by reawakening Eastern Europeans' ability to question.

Enough's enough

By 1982, Sís had had enough. After the Czech government sent him to Los Angeles to make a film about the upcoming Olympics, he decided not to return. He was sentenced in absentia to 3 1/2 years in prison. In defecting, Sís left behind parents, siblings and a second cousin whose own foiled escape had left him a broken man after years in a prison labor camp.

Adrift in the U.S. and nearly broke, Sís was quickly embraced by powerful mentors. Film director Milos Forman hired him to paint the "Amadeus" poster. Maurice Sendak recruited him into children's books, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis published his first Prague-based book, "The Three Golden Keys," and declared him a "genius."

Sís fulfilled that promise in 2003, when he won a MacArthur "genius" grant.

At 6 feet, he's a solid, substantial man with a square face and direct gaze. He can be light and charming, and his history suggests a deep well of courage.

Yet his fear of government is so ingrained he said he doesn't believe he could ever sign a petition or take part in a demonstration -- unless it was to save his 13-year-old son from a return of the draft.

"The idea is still scary to me -- to take a stand," he said.

When he rides the train home from his Manhattan office, which used to stand in the shadow of the Twin Towers, the post-9/11 security reminds him of Prague in the old Soviet days, when posters urged citizens to report anyone who looked suspicious.

"You get these leaflets (in New York) that say, 'If you see anyone who looks unusual, call this number.' Of course it makes sense with what happened in New York," Sís said, bewilderment in his voice. "But if you go on the subway, everyone looks unusual."

Sometimes his fear comes out in unexpected ways. It happened the day Sís was called as a prospective juror on several cases involving accused drug dealers who could be convicted on police testimony.

"Look," Sís told the judge, "I know there are some good American police. But I grew up in a country where we were afraid of the police."